RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Global agriculture and carbon trade-offs
JF Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
JO Proc Natl Acad Sci USA
FD National Academy of Sciences
DO 10.1073/pnas.1412835111
A1 Johnson, Justin Andrew
A1 Runge, Carlisle Ford
A1 Senauer, Benjamin
A1 Foley, Jonathan
A1 Polasky, Stephen
YR 2014
UL http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/08/06/1412835111.abstract
AB We assess how to meet growing demand for agricultural production to minimize impact on the environment. Higher levels of population and affluence may require expanding land in agriculture by converting grasslands and forests to cropland. Such conversions often reduce valuable ecosystem services. Our research identifies where are the best places to expand agricultural production that minimize the loss of one ecosystem service, carbon storage. We show that selectively choosing where to expand agriculture saves over $1 trillion (2012 US dollars) worth of carbon storage relative to a proportional expansion.Feeding a growing and increasingly affluent world will require expanded agricultural production, which may require converting grasslands and forests into cropland. Such conversions can reduce carbon storage, habitat provision, and other ecosystem services, presenting difficult societal trade-offs. In this paper, we use spatially explicit data on agricultural productivity and carbon storage in a global analysis to find where agricultural extensification should occur to meet growing demand while minimizing carbon emissions from land use change. Selective extensification saves ∼6 billion metric tons of carbon compared with a business-as-usual approach, with a value of approximately $1 trillion (2012 US dollars) using recent estimates of the social cost of carbon. This type of spatially explicit geospatial analysis can be expanded to include other ecosystem services and other industries to analyze how to minimize conflicts between economic development and environmental sustainability.